In 1513 and 1514, Dürer created his three most important engraved works: “Knight, Death and the Devil,” “St. Jerome in His Study,” and “Melencolia I.” Paired with “St. Jerome,” “Knight, Death and the Devil” represents the worldly life of action contrasted with the spiritual, contemplative life; the three works including “Melencolia” comprise an allegorical cycle corresponding to three human virtues influencing life: moral, theological, and intellectual. The first to appear was “Knight, Death and the Devil,” the Knight personifying Christian faith in the aspect of decisive, ethical man living in the practical world of experience and action, undismayed by the dangers of mortal life or the prospect of death. The Knight, with a stern but nearly smiling look of concentration and confidence, rides with his dog through the gloom of a rock-faced, haunted ravine lined with barren trees - the place is a state of anxiety and foreboding. Death, with snakes coiling around his head and neck, his face that of a decaying corpse, rides a bedraggled, exhausted horse as if to cut across the Knight’s path, and tries to frighten him with a more than half-spilled hourglass, “while the swine-snouted Devil sneaks up behind him with a pickaxe” (Panofsky). But the Devil has an idiot look, in spite of his monstrous head, claws, cloven hoofs and drooping bat wings. These two are the kind of nightmares that with the proper confidence one can just tell to go away - the Devil looks like a fool and Death himself looks shy. The ethical man proceeds through the world like a pilgrim on the path of virtue, the enemies of the spirit not to be feared but ignored and steadfastly passed by.

Dürer’s engraving astonished his contemporaries, only in part because it is a technical masterpiece in which myriad bits of line distinguish metal, fur, flesh, glass, bone, scales, and stone. Dürer’s decision to change the movement of the Knight’s horse by the position of the bent right leg is more intriguing than distracting, the correction of the hoof incompletely camouflaged as a clump of grass.